Earlier this year, Spawning Tool added co-op replay parsing and build orders on the Spawning Tool website. As usual with programming, the approach was clear, but I ran into many minor issues, and in the end, it required an entire code rewrite.
So this post will dive into that process. Although the content is technical, it hopefully will make sense to non-programmers as well. For the programmers out there, you can see the actual code this pull request. Continue reading
For a long time, Spawning Tool lampshaded its lack of support for Chrono Boost. The timing on Protoss build orders was consistently a few seconds ahead for upgrades and some units, and we just marked it as a “caveat.” With the release of filterable build orders (that included workers) and playable build orders (where times really matter), it became very apparent that we needed to correct that. So we did.
For the curious, we can go into more details about the technical challenges to get to here and the remaining issues with it.
Why we were lazy about fixing it
Chrono Boost has been marked as an issue to address for a few months now but has been a known issue for over 2 years. It has been tricky because the data between casting abilities and building units is hard to line up. Continue reading